J. David Hulchanski

Recent Articles

T he corruption scandal at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been popularly reported as a story of how Reagan Administration officials steered scarce subsidies to political insiders. That picture is accurate, but the real issue at HUD concerns the roles that government, private developers, and community organizations ought to play in an effective national program for affordable housing. The public is rightly skeptical of programs that offer big profits to politically connected developers and consultants in the name of housing the poor. However, the solution is not to scrap federal housing programs, as some conservatives suggested in the wake of the HUD uproar. Instead, we should learn from the successes of our neighbors in Canada and of other industrial nations like Sweden, Holland, and France, which target government housing funds to nonprofit community developers. Unlike HUD, their programs are virtually corruption-free, and they do a better job of supplying...